Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW is a worker, author, storyteller, musician and culture activist. In 2010, he founded Orphan Wisdom, a house for learning skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. It is a redemptive project that comes from where he comes from. It is rooted in knowing history, being claimed by ancestry, working for a time he won’t live to see. When not on the road, he makes books, succumbs to interviews, tends to labours on a small farm, mends broken handles and fences, and bends towards lifeways dictated by the seasons of the boreal borderlands.

In 2016 he and Canadian singer/songwriter and recording artist Gregory Hoskins fused their separate works into an evening of music that is part concert, part poetry, part lamentation, part ribaldry, part lifting the mortal veil and learning the mysteries there. That’s what’s been performed to sold out houses in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Iceland and the USA.

The Nights of Grief & Mystery is their devotional act.